This has to be a joke, right?
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A little girl blows away dandelion fluff as an announcer says, “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life,” in an advertisement targeting global warming “alarmists,” especially Al Gore.
Who just happens to have a film coming out about global warming, called “An Inconvenient Truth.” It certainly doesn’t sit well with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of those industry-funded “think tanks” where mediocre conservative mouthbreathers can get paid very well to sit around coming up with boneheaded ideas like this:
Against backdrops of a park, a beach and a forest, one celebrates the benefits of greenhouse gas-producing fuels.
“The fuels that produce CO2 (carbon dioxide) have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love,” the ad runs. “Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed — what would our lives be like then?”
Perhaps, just perhaps, we’d be forced to look reality in the face and do something about our energy consumption and get serious about looking for alternative sources of energy that *don’t* give off greenhouse gases. Hm?
The other ad questions media reports of the threat of climate change, especially a Time magazine issue devoted to the topic, and shows film of a glacier melting and then runs in reverse to show the glacier reconstituting itself.
“We had started work on this several months back, but we sort of changed course once the flood of glacier-melting stories began,” said Sam Kazman, an institute lawyer who worked on the ads. “So we did want to get out there before the Al Gore film got into national opening.”
That is just startlingly stupid. Do they honestly think that people won’t get that the glacier is, in fact, melting?
Oh, but here’s the hand of the Kyoto-shredding, climatologist–suppressing, report-dismissing, overwhelming-evidence-ignoring Bush Administration in these ads:
Fred Smith, president of the institute, a lobbying group closely allied to the Bush administration that stresses limited government regulation and a free-market approach to environmental issues, said he had seen the film and found it “very alarmist,” although well-produced.
There have certainly been some free-market solutions to pollution that have had some effect, but it’s going to take government action to make the kind of huge changes in everything from CAFE standards to alternative fuels to factory emissions that are needed to give us any hope of arresting and reversing the damage we’re doing to this planet. Unfortunately, our government is in the hands of someone who probably thinks that global warming is just swell, because it gets us closer to the Rapture. If, as Al Gore says, we have about 10 years left to put the brakes on, we effectively have only 7, because Bush is in the White House for another 3, and he didn’t learn a damn thing from Katrina and Rita and the death of a great American city.
But the institute questions the impact of global warming while a broad range of scientists and environmentalists, including Gore, have linked it to more severe storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels.
“They fly in the face of most of the science,” Charlie Miller of Environmental Defense said of the institute ads. “The good news is that there’s not a trade-off here between prosperity, jobs, growth and protecting the Earth. We can do both.”
Environmental Defense and the Ad Council released public service announcements in March featuring children as future victims of global warming, and these were mentioned critically at the briefing where the new ads were released.
How much do you want to bet there’s some under-the-table illegal government propaganda funding in there somehow, a la Maggie Gallagher, Armstrong Williams, and Mike McManus? Only now that the use of columnists and fake newscasts has been exposed, they have to turn to think-tank ads?
UPDATE: Pam’s got a link to one of the ads.